


Debut

by evelyn_b



Category: Voyná i mir | War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-22
Updated: 2014-06-22
Packaged: 2018-02-05 17:43:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1826725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evelyn_b/pseuds/evelyn_b
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything changed the last year Elena was allowed to swim. A very short story about Helene Kuragina. Mild woobification.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Debut

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Alley_Skywalker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alley_Skywalker/gifts).



The last year Elena was allowed to swim, her old nurse followed her down to the lake with a bundle of silk and worn muslin to shield her body from her brothers' eyes. Lusya, who had bathed all the Kuragin children since Vasily was a child, waited on the docks with her misshapen lower lip thrust out in toleration. No one had told her to do this exactly, just as no one had told Elena to put on the petticoat and drawers, or that it was the last year. It just was, hard and strange and part of her, the way new teeth come in under tender gums. One year she swam naked with her brothers, the next in clothes that filled with cold water and weighed on her like marble, the next year not at all. No one spoke of it; no argument or appeal was possible. If you asked her about it, she would have said only: Of course, stupid. What do you think? The knowledge grew on her unbidden, like her body.

Her brothers knew even less. The Kuragin children were too close in childhood, speaking their own patchwork tongue of peasant Russian and starving-tutor French, an island apart, unmanageable and protective. It was a stroke of luck for their parents that Elena grew up early. The last summer she was allowed to swim, she struggled for a while in her heavy clothes, then sat on the old white rock by the pine tree she and Anatole called Old Skinny to watch them splash and dive unburdened without her. She saw their naked limbs shimmer under the water and disappear. She could feel herself falling away from them slowly, like a raft cut loose or a white stone that was sinking. Lusya scolded her for her sulky looks and went away into the shade to mend stockings, and Elena sat in her father’s old Chinese silk dressing-gown a long time watching the water quaver and settle and grow still.

Anatole learned this only later, when it was too late for knowing it to mean anything. All he knew was that his sister used to be the same as him, and now she was different and further away. Ippolit, who was fifteen, said “Women,” and chuckled in his throat, with a sound he had recently learned was grown-up and worldly.

In the days after, Elena avoided mirrors except when she was alone. Her face had become both too fascinating, so that she did not trust herself not to stare at it stupidly, and and at the same time repulsive, sending a cruel pang of loathing down her throat to the pit of her stomach. She found that if she held her face just so, in one of the calm faint smiles or mildly sardonic expressions she practiced while she was alone, it was not bad – perfectly lovely, even – a perfectly lovely mask. But if she laughed, or looked annoyed, or did anything natural to herself, it was as though the mask cracked and underneath was something hideous and embarrassing. 

No one else seemed to notice. Her shape was alarming; her father’s friends made jokes about deals with the devil, and took bets that she could not possibly be fourteen, even when she was still only thirteen. Her mother, the massive and beautiful Princess Aline, shouldered the apprentice hairdresser roughly to push Elena’s sore breasts upward and in as she fastened the new green bodice of her ball gown, sighing deliberately as though Elena herself were distasteful. 

“When I was your age, I was still playing with dolls,” she said accusingly. 

“Lenochka plays with dolls,” said Anatole, who was not supposed to be there, but whom Elena had refused to shoo away. It was the evening of her debut in St. Petersburg, and Anatole was jealous and confused as he always was when his sister showed signs of being a separate person.

Their mother clicked her tongue in irritation. 

“If you can’t talk sense, and you don’t understand what grown-ups are talking about," she said, "don’t speak at all.” 

“I should go to the ball if you care so much about who plays with dolls” he added. “since I don’t play with dolls.”

“Says who?” said Elena. A wry smile broke over her face and Anatole watched her suppress it quickly. 

“En français, s’il vous plait,” said the princess Aline, whose own French was stiff and clumsy. 

“You look naked,” he said solemnly, then laughed. He had meant to be serious, but realized too late he could not say the word “naked” without laughing. This time Elena maintained her composure. 

“It’s a ballgown, dummy,” she said placidly. “You've seen them before.”

“You're going to be frozen,” he said. “You'll be goose-bumpy like a chicken leg.”

Elena stuck her tongue out at Anatole from the corner of her mouth and shut her eyes to keep from looking in the mirror.

"Open up your eyes," said the apprentice hairdresser, a bone-grey woman of indeterminate age whom the Kuragins refused to call by any other name even though the original hairdresser had long since passed away. "Look. Don't be foolish.”

"You open your own eyes," said Anatole sharply. He slumped against the door with his chin tucked against his chest. "Lenochka, tell papa I can go. I dance better than Ippolit, and he won't protect you from the scoundrels."

Elena laughed suddenly. "What's a scoundrel? Silly! What are you thinking of?" She squirmed from the apprentice hairdresser's grip and turned to face him, her big murky eyes almost troubled.

"All kind of awful people go to balls, you know," said Anatole. "Old Prince Bezukhov and his string of mistresses, and officers who know heaven knows what, and Englishmen or who knows what kind of people. Ippolit won't care because he likes them, and Papa won't notice. . . because." But Anatole did not elect to finish the thought about Papa. Their mother glowered sadly under her lovely arched brows, the deep creases in her forehead dusted with white powder. 

"Who tells you such stories?" she said.

"No one in particular," said Anatole truthfully. "Only it's true, isn't it?"

" _Count_  Bezhukov is a count," said Elena.

"Princes are better, right?"

" _Kuragins_  are better," said Elena. "I suppose a prince can be any old drooler."

Anatole laughed. Elena laughed too, for a moment, and then stopped. She had caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and the shock of alarm and mild disgust that always accompanied her own face in animation in those days. She lowered her eyelids and fluttered her eyes to blur the image. Anatole seemed to become serious in response to her composure.

"Is that all the clothes you're wearing, though?" he said.

Elena did not open her eyes, but remembered seeing in the cloudy silver mirror, like moonlight, her luminous dense flesh as bare as if she were swimming under a full moon. Lusya fastened the low back of the moss-green ball gown with her large mouth all twisted to one side. Looking at her neck and shoulders, she could see herself breathing. For a moment, it made her afraid, as though there were something dangerous about having lungs. Was it dangerous? Ippolit, at a dinner for friends of the family, made a joke once about a certain actress, her breasts and her breathing, that may not have been entirely a joke. Elena had smiled and pretended to understand, while her mother scowled and false-laughed as people do when they wish to show their disapproval without disrupting the flow of conversation. What did it have to do with her?  _Old Count Bezukhov and his string of mistresses_. She tried to imagine what it would be like to have a string of mistresses, but that didn't make sense. The masculine of mistress was _master_ and that was for peasants. Well, Anatole was stupid, poor silly Anatole, and questions only made people laugh at you. Only if you seem to already understand will they tell you anything.

Some things were correct and proper for the right people, and wholly repellent and foolish for others. In the gaslight, in the candlelight, it was correct and refined to be naked in this way, while in moonlight or sunlight it was forbidden. Elena tried one expression after another, but none was anything but ugly. Her eyes were like flat puddles on black earth. There were no lines yet in her wide white forehead. If she held her face perfectly still, eyebrows arched and her mouth just so, it was not so bad. In the silvery mirror she practiced cautious, calm smiles, fractions of sadness, the gentle lift of an eyebrow that left her forehead smooth, the lowered purple eyelids like smoky silk.

When she arrived at the ball, it no longer seemed strange to be naked. At first she kept the dark green wrapper around her shoulders, but her father jested about her newfound modesty, kindly but without reprieve, until she took it off. Somehow her skin had become like a magnet. The whole room bent around her and shimmered, filled with nameless possibility.

There were people for whom nearly anything was possible, and there were people for whom all doors but one were locked and bolted. Her mother, marred by resentment and the celebrated beauty spot on her cheek that had grown, in Elena's childhood, into a wide, dense cluster of moles, was clearly one of the latter, though Elena did not have the patience or the clarity of mind to work out why; it was simply an annoyance, a thing she found ugly to look at and avoided, the way she would avert her eyes at a beggar or the corpse of a bird on the road. There was a stiffness in her large white arms and in the set of her mouth something irritating, wounded and small. 

Elena would be of those for whom things were possible. She did not decide this exactly, but somewhere in the late hours of her first ball it was decided in her and she assented, not because she had thought it through, but because the alternative did not bear thinking of. She was fourteen years old and no one believed it. For years afterward no one would believe she was as young as she was. The old and young men made jokes; the women giggled and fawned and touched her shoulders with their gloved hands. Her innocence was a joke and her large luminous body was a joke and a gift to others. They laughed about her charms as though she were trying to fool them in some way. She could see all that distantly and clearly as through fathoms of bright water, though she had no need to see it or to think about it, and submerged the thought with all needless thoughts, and with everything to which she had no answer, at the bottom of a deep, cold lake. She let them fall slowly into darkness and smoothed her mind as she smoothed the creases from her moss-green silk and velvet gown.


End file.
